La città dolente. Lettere da Napoli

Upon hearing of the cholera epidemic in Naples, Axel Munthe sets out to offer his assistance. A Swedish physician and intellectual enamored of Capri and the beauty of Campania, Munthe collected the story of his stay—between the final months of 1884 and early 1885—in a series of correspondence for a Stockholm newspaper, the title of which is already emblematic: "Letters from a Mourning City." The portrait that emerges from his accounts is that of a suffering yet vibrant reality, full of contradictions yet always dignified. A Naples he loves and knows profoundly, whose humanity he seeks even in the poorest and most abandoned neighborhoods. Where, alongside the pain, the solace of the most authentic human solidarity is never lacking.